Editorial:

Past co-Editor (American Journal of Psychology) and Associate Editor (Animal Learning and Behavior, Learning and Motivation, Hormones and Behavior); Editorial boards (several over the years; currently Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, American Journal of Psychology, Review of General
Psychology.)

Federal Grant Review Committees:

Multi-year terms as permanent member of NIDA, NIMH (Chair) and NSF (twice); ad-hoc
member for various federal agencies, 1-3 times each year.

Recent Awards:

Our laboratory has had continuous federal funding for nearly 50 years, beginning at
Rutgers in 1963. Several graduate students in the laboratory have had predoctoral
NIH fellowships during that time and several postdoctoral associates have had postdoctoral
fellowships or research grants of their own. We currently have three NIH grants, including
two 5-year RO1 grants and one RO1 equivalent as part of an NIAAA Center based on faculty
from Binghamton University and Upstate Medical School.

Research Interests:

Developmental behavioral neuroscience; characteristics and neurobiological mechanisms
of the ontogeny of alcohol ingestion and alcohol reinforcement during early ontogeny;
very early learning and the ontogeny of memory.

Research Description:

Our research, supported by NIAAA, focuses on two issues: What in brain or environment
determine the consequences of alcohol early in life, before and after birth, and how
does early experience with alcohol influence later responsiveness to alcohol? We seek
to understand (1) what determines alcohol ingestion and reinforcement early in life
and how these determinants change as the animal develops from fetus to adulthood,
and (2) how early experience with alcohol, prenatal and older, alters this responsiveness.
Throughout this analysis we give special attention to the consequences of early learning
about the sensory and pharmacological effects of alcohol, and developmental changes
in neurochemical systems linked to alcohol ingestion and reinforcement.

A related continuous focus in our laboratory is how the processes of learning and
memory change during development from the prenatal period throughout infancy. The
central phenomenon in this work has been infantile amnesia, and the theoretical framework
for conceptualizing it and related effects emphasizes memory retrieval. Experiments
with rats of different ages, from infancy to adulthood, indicate that what is stored
in memory changes dramatically with ontogeny and allow the feasibility of interpreting
infantile amnesia in terms of an age-specific encoding that results in a failure in
later memory retrieval. A related recent focus is in understanding the remarkable
strength of memories acquired soon after birth and its relationship to neurochemical
and hormonal effects induced by the process of birth.

Philosophy of Graduate Training:

Like many multidisciplinary laboratories, we take a team-based approach to both our
research and graduate training. My primary research collaborator, Dr. Juan Carlos
Molina, along with our two major senior collaborators, Dr. Elena Varlinskaya and Dr.
Andrey Kozlov, plus three postdoctoral research associates, Dr. Michael Nizhnikov,
Dr. Carlos Arias and Dr. Ricardo Pautassi, work as a team to provide graduate and
undergraduate students the opportunity to develop ideas for experiments, conceptual
frameworks and instrumentation and aid them in testing specific hypotheses as they
see fit. The aim is to provide a congenial environment, stimulating but not oppressive,
in which to study and engage in cutting-edge publishable research from the moment
students arrive in the lab. The goal we emphasize is to ensure insofar as possible
that students obtain the credentials (education, publications and papers presented)
needed for the type of employment or further education they seek when they receive
their degrees. Graduates of our lab have benefited from this in acquiring positions
in industry, particularly pharmaceutical corporations, and in academia as professors,
with several going on to become administrators as chairs or deans or vice-presidents
and one as president of a major university.

All graduate students, postdocs and research collaborators during the past 10 years
have been supported by federal grants or fellowships from the U.S. or other countries.

Selected Publications:

For further background and publications, click on Dr. Spear's curriculum vitae.